Objects types and some useful R functions for beginners

This blog post is an excerpt of my ebook Modern R with the tidyverse that you can read for
free here. This is taken from Chapter 2, which explains
the different R objects you can manipulate as well as some functions to get you started.

Objects, types and useful R functions to get started

All objects in R have a given type. You already know most of them, as these types are also used
in mathematics. Integers, floating point numbers, or floats, matrices, etc, are all objects you
are already familiar with. But R has other, maybe lesser known data types (that you can find in a
lot of other programming languages) that you need to become familiar with. But first, we need to
learn how to assign a value to a variable. This can be done in two ways:

a

or

a = 3

in very practical terms, there is no difference between the two. I prefer using for assigning
values to variables and reserve = for passing arguments to functions, for example:

spam

I think this is less confusing than:

spam = mean(x = c(1,2,3))

but as I explained above you can use whatever you feel most comfortable with.

The numeric class

To define single numbers, you can do the following:

a

The class() function allows you to check the class of an object:

class(a)

## [1] "numeric"

Decimals are defined with the character .:

a

R also supports integers. If you find yourself in a situation where you explicitly need an integer
and not a floating point number, you can use the following:

a

## [1] "integer"

The as.integer() function is very useful, because it converts its argument into an integer. There
is a whole family of as.*() functions. To convert a into a floating point number again:

class(as.numeric(a))

## [1] "numeric"

There is also is.numeric() which tests whether a number is of the numeric class:

is.numeric(a)

## [1] TRUE

These functions are very useful, there is one for any of the supported types in R. Later, we are going
to learn about the {purrr} package, which is a very powerful package for functional programming. This
package includes further such functions.

The character class

Use " " to define characters (called strings in other programming languages):

a

class(a)

## [1] "character"

To convert something to a character you can use the as.character() function:

a

## [1] "numeric"

class(as.character(a))

## [1] "character"

It is also possible to convert a character to a numeric:

a

## [1] "character"

class(as.numeric(a))

## [1] "numeric"

But this only works if it makes sense:

a

## [1] "character"

as.numeric(a)

## Warning: NAs introduced by coercion

## [1] NA

A very nice package to work with characters is {stringr}, which is also part of the {tidyverse}.

The factor class

Factors look like characters, but are very different. They are the representation of categorical
variables. A {tidyverse} package to work with factors is {forcats}. You would rarely use
factor variables outside of datasets, so for now, it is enough to know that this class exists.
We are going to learn more about factor variables in Chapter 4, by using the {forcats} package.

The Date class

Dates also look like characters, but are very different too:

as.Date("2019/03/19")

## [1] "2019-03-19"

class(as.Date("2019/03/19"))

## [1] "Date"

Manipulating dates and time can be tricky, but thankfully there’s a {tidyverse} package for that,
called {lubridate}. We are going to go over this package in Chapter 4.

The logical class

This class is the result of logical comparisons, for example, if you type:

4 > 3

## [1] TRUE

R returns TRUE, which is an object of class logical:

k 3
class(k)

## [1] "logical"

In other programming languages, logicals are often called bools. A logical variable can only have
two values, either TRUE or FALSE. You can test the truthiness of a variable with isTRUE():

k 3
isTRUE(k)

## [1] TRUE

How can you test if a variable is false? There is not a isFALSE() function (at least not without having
to load a package containing this function), but there is way to do it:

k 3
!isTRUE(k)

## [1] FALSE

The ! operator indicates negation, so the above expression could be translated as is k not TRUE?.
There are other such operators, namely &, &&, |, ||. & means and and | stands for or.
You might be wondering what the difference between & and && is? Or between | and ||? & and| work on vectors, doing pairwise comparisons:

one

## [1] FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE

Compare this to the && operator:

one

## [1] FALSE

The && and || operators only compare the first element of the vectors and stop as soon as a the return
value can be safely determined. This is called short-circuiting. Consider the following:

one

## [1] FALSE

one || two || three

## [1] TRUE

The || operator stops as soon it evaluates to TRUE whereas the && stops as soon as it evaluates to FALSE.
Personally, I rarely use || or && because I get confused. I find using | or & in combination with theall() or any() functions much more useful:

one

## [1] TRUE

all(one & two)

## [1] FALSE

any() checks whether any of the vector’s elements are TRUE and all() checks if all elements of the vector areTRUE.

As a final note, you should know that is possible to use T for TRUE and F for FALSE but I would advise against
doing this, because it is not very explicit.

Vectors and matrices

You can create a vector in different ways. But first of all, it is important to understand that a
vector in most programming languages is nothing more than a list of things. These things can be
numbers (either integers or floats), strings, or even other vectors. A vector in R can only contain elements of one
single type. This is not the case for a list, which is much more flexible. We will talk about lists shortly, but
let’s first focus on vectors and matrices.

The c() function

A very important function that allows you to build a vector is c():

a

This creates a vector with elements 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. If you check its class:

class(a)

## [1] "numeric"

This can be confusing: you where probably expecting a to be of class vector or
something similar. This is not the case if you use c() to create the vector, because c()
doesn’t build a vector in the mathematical sense, but a so-called atomic vector.
Checking its dimension:

dim(a)

## NULL

returns NULL because an atomic vector doesn’t have a dimension.
If you want to create a true vector, you need to use cbind() or rbind().

But before continuing, be aware that atomic vectors can only contain elements of the same type:

c(1, 2, "3")

## [1] "1" "2" "3"

because “3” is a character, all the other values get implicitly converted to characters. You have
to be very careful about this, and if you use atomic vectors in your programming, you have to make
absolutely sure that no characters or logicals or whatever else are going to convert your atomic
vector to something you were not expecting.

cbind() and rbind()

You can create a true vector with cbind():

a

Check its class now:

class(a)

## [1] "matrix"

This is exactly what we expected. Let’s check its dimension:

dim(a)

## [1] 1 5

This returns the dimension of a using the LICO notation (number of LInes first, the number of COlumns).

It is also possible to bind vectors together to create a matrix.

b

Now let’s put vector a and b into a matrix called matrix_c using rbind().rbind() functions the same way as cbind() but glues the vectors together by rows and not by columns.

matrix_c

## [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4] [,5]
## [1,] 1 2 3 4 5
## [2,] 6 7 8 9 10

The matrix class

R also has support for matrices. For example, you can create a matrix of dimension (5,5) filled
with 0’s with the matrix() function:

I have heard many people praising R for being a matrix based language. Matrices are indeed useful,
and statisticians are used to working with them. However, I very rarely use matrices in my
day to day work, and prefer an approach based on data frames (which will be discussed below). This
is because working with data frames makes it easier to use R’s advanced functional programming
language capabilities, and this is where R really shines in my opinion. Working with matrices
almost automatically implies using loops and all the iterative programming techniques, à la Fortran,
which I personally believe are ill-suited for interactive statistical programming (as discussed in
the introduction).

The list class

The list class is a very flexible class, and thus, very useful. You can put anything inside a list,
such as numbers:

list1

or other lists constructed with c():

list2

you can also put objects of different classes in the same list:

list3

and of course create list of lists:

my_lists

To check the contents of a list, you can use the structure function str():

Lists are used extensively because they are so flexible. You can build lists of datasets and apply
functions to all the datasets at once, build lists of models, lists of plots, etc… In the later
chapters we are going to learn all about them. Lists are central objects in a functional programming
workflow for interactive statistical analysis.

The data.frame and tibble classes

In the next chapter we are going to learn how to import datasets into R. Once you import data, the
resulting object is either a data.frame or a tibble depending on which package you used to
import the data. tibbles extend data.frames so if you know about data.frame objects already,
working with tibbles will be very easy. tibbles have a better print() method, and some other
niceties.

However, I want to stress that these objects are central to R and are thus very important; they are
actually special cases of lists, discussed above. There are different ways to print a data.frame or
a tibble if you wish to inspect it. You can use View(my_data) to show the my_datadata.frame
in the View pane of RStudio:

You can also use the str() function:

str(my_data)

And if you need to access an individual column, you can use the $ sign, same as for a list:

my_data$col1

Formulas

We will learn more about formulas later, but because it is an important object, it is useful if you
already know about them early on. A formula is defined in the following way:

my_formula

## [1] "formula"

Formula objects are defined using the ~ symbol. Formulas are useful to define statistical models,
for example for a linear regression:

lm(y ~ x)

or also to define anonymous functions, but more on this later.

Models

A statistical model is an object like any other in R:

data(mtcars)
my_model

## [1] "lm"

my_model is an object of class lm. You can apply different functions to a model object:

To create a sequence, things are not as straightforward. There is seq():

seq(1, 10)

## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

seq(70, 80)

## [1] 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

It is also possible to provide a by argument:

seq(1, 10, by = 2)

## [1] 1 3 5 7 9

seq_along() behaves similarly, but returns the length of the object passed to it. So if you pass list4 toseq_along(), it will return a sequence from 1 to 3:

seq_along(list4)

## [1] 1 2 3

which is also true for seq() actually:

seq(list4)

## [1] 1 2 3

but these two functions behave differently for arguments of length equal to 1:

seq(10)

## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

seq_along(10)

## [1] 1

So be quite careful about that. I would advise you do not use seq(), but only seq_along() and seq_len(). seq_len()
only takes arguments of length 1:

seq_len(10)

## [1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

seq_along(10)

## [1] 1

The problem with seq() is that it is unpredictable; depending on its input, the output will either be an integer or a sequence.
When programming, it is better to have function that are stricter and fail when confronted to special cases, instead of returning
some result. This is a bit of a recurrent issue with R, and the functions from the {tidyverse} mitigate this issue by being
stricter than their base R counterparts. For example, consider the ifelse() function from base R:

ifelse(3 > 5, 1, "this is false")

## [1] "this is false"

and compare it to {dplyr}’s implementation, if_else():

if_else(3 > 5, 1, "this is false")
Error: `false` must be type double, not character
Call `rlang::last_error()` to see a backtrace

if_else() fails because the return value when FALSE is not a double (a real number) but a character. This might seem unnecessarily
strict, but at least it is predictable. This makes debugging easier when used inside functions. In Chapter 8 we are going to learn how
to write our own functions, and being strict makes programming easier.

Basic string manipulation

For now, we have not closely studied character objects, we only learned how to define them. Later, in Chapter 5 we will learn about the{stringr} package which provides useful function to work with strings. However, there are several base R functions that are very
useful that you might want to know nonetheless, such as paste() and paste0():

paste("Hello", "amigo")

## [1] "Hello amigo"

but you can also change the separator if needed:

paste("Hello", "amigo", sep = "--")

## [1] "Hello--amigo"

paste0() is the same as paste() but does not have any sep argument:

paste0("Hello", "amigo")

## [1] "Helloamigo"

If you provide a vector of characters, you can also use the collapse argument, which places whatever you provide for collapse between the
characters of the vector:

paste0(c("Joseph", "Mary", "Jesus"), collapse = ", and ")

## [1] "Joseph, and Mary, and Jesus"

To change the case of characters, you can use toupper() and tolower():

tolower("HAHAHAHAH")

## [1] "hahahahah"

toupper("hueuehuehuheuhe")

## [1] "HUEUEHUEHUHEUHE"

Mathematical functions

Finally, there are the classical mathematical functions that you know and love: